MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Aug 12, 2016, 21:36:Whoa, full release in November? They still have at least 2-3 perks to even release in Early Access... and quite a bit of fine tuning to do, although that will probably just go on after the official release anyway.

SWAT, Martial Artist, and maybe another perk? I forget. SWAT is in the beta version now (separate from Early Access version), but is missing the shield people were actually hoping for.

Good luck, Tripwire.

I think they're only doing one more perk, and they've said it's not going to be the Martial Artist. The katana is a Berzerker weapon now, and it was always supposedly going to be for MA. So, I'm pretty sure they've cut MA and replaced it with whatever the unannounced tenth class is. I'm pretty sure they always said there would be ten classes on release.

No idea what it's going to be. It seems like they're already struggling to differentiate a few of the classes they have, though they're all fun to play. Commando just isn't worth the bother on full servers though, it's always less effective than something more specialized when you have a team big enough to cover all the bases.

Slick wrote on Jul 26, 2016, 14:37:But that does absolutely nothing to discount the irony that the most secure platforms to have a clean competitive match today is on fucking consoles.

Maybe people should wise up a little and stop trying to have serious competitive scenes online. Serious mode used to mean a LAN party. Pretty hard to get away with this shit if a guy can watch over your shoulder.

Slick wrote on Jul 26, 2016, 13:53:But do you really not get the potential upside of a walled garden?

I read what you wrote, I just don't care. There is nothing within five conceptual miles of "walled garden" that has a meaningful upside. This is like telling me to consider the upside of being the middle of the human centipede.

"A class of app that can't be fucked with in the first place?" Are you high? Anything can be fucked with, and with all that money floating around in e-sports, life will find a way. Meanwhile, devs producing legitimate products will have to divert part of their budget to coding around Microsoft's mistakes, and many attempts to do so will fail or be buggy as shit.

eRe4s3r wrote on Jul 26, 2016, 13:25:Yeah as I said Niche games (And it's totally OK if you didn't like Tidalis) and GoG just don't mix.. which is why I consider Steam absolutely vital. I mean there are tons of games I don't like on Steam.. but personally I want to see them on GoG and Steam because I like competition and choice, and GoG curating for reason X (certainly for genre: niche puzzlers | v-novel | kinetic novel etc.) is not how an *open* platform behaves. Steam is an open platform and GoG certainly stopped being that a long time ago. Which is why I am even more annoyed by UWP games than usual, nobody is served by another curated store. The curator might have shit taste, a bad day or whatever and robs you of seeing and finding the 1 game you love above all (however unlikely)

And remember, if you didn't have the contrast of bad games on Steam you wouldn't really have a way to build up a proper taste in games

Anyway, not faulting GoG, just saying that GoG is not an open platform anymore even though for the most part they still sell truly online DRM free games... but that boundary is blurring.

GoG has lots of point-and-click adventures. Arguably, they're part of the reason the genre is making a comeback; those things were as niche as it gets for a few years. I don't know what their curation standards are at all, and maybe that's really the problem. Nobody does. Has anyone ever asked?

As for the idea of needing "contrast," there's a pretty broad spectrum of quality available without dipping into the pits of Greenlight hell. The sheer volume of crapware infesting it currently is definitely more of a pestilence than a boon, because it allows people doing scummy and illegal nonsense to hide under the garbage heap. For every jackass hawking broken or stolen content on Steam that gets called out, there's a dozen more who don't. I feel like some kind of quality standards are an absolute necessity, and it annoys me that Valve gave up on even attempting to enforce any a long time ago.

Nobody is saying it is. They're saying that changes already made will make it easier for them to attempt to make it that way. It seems to be what they want to do, and whether or not they pull the trigger will hinge on how the market moves. It should not move to UWP.

2) This idea that forced patching will make other services break is chicken little territory.

Dude, patches already do that constantly by accident. If you're forcing them on the users, the clear intent is to make them accept changes they don't want that go beyond fixing security holes. My understanding is that MS has a history of making certain things hard for developers in order to ensure that their product is better than competing ones.

3) UWP will need to create value for it to be of any interest to developers, or consumers. Last I checked they recently added the ability to enable V-Sync.

And there's exhibit A. They had to add that. Why was it removed in the first place? The answer is that they're doing all kinds of shit with the rendering pipeline. I don't understand most of it, but I know I've heard developers complaining about it. Particularly obnoxious is how they're making it difficult to run in fullscreen rather than borderless window. The stated reason for this change is to make it easier for them to stick overlays on everything, and if this causes performance issues then too bad for you.

Add to this the fact that the sandboxing breaks anti-cheat solutions and makes any game using this mess unstreamable without using their software, and there's a whole lot of fucking bad shit here.

I don't have an axe to grind here, I know Tidalis because I worked with the devs before (not on Tidalis, mind you) and they make great niche games.

Huh. This confuses me somewhat. Why would the store that built its reputation on selling stuff DRM-free be pushing a client in this fashion? I knew they had one, of course, but I didn't know they were tying multiplayer to it. That's stupid.

As far as them not selling most puzzle games, it's their business if they want to leave money on the table. And you know, maybe they do; Valve is raking it in with all the asset flips and other shovelware turning Greenlight into a pig sty. Perhaps GoG believes that stricter curation will have a better payoff in the long run. I don't think they can be faulted for that.

eRe4s3r wrote on Jul 26, 2016, 10:48:Except GOG is the real closed platform. Try talking with some indy devs who were flat out refused with no reason given... Steam doesn't pull such bullshit. You pass Greenlight = you get on Steam.

Yeah, and we all know how many bad games made it onto Steam because all Valve cares about is money and not game quality. I guess GOG is just avoiding this for now...

If it were about quality.. but GoG does not select by quality, they select by genre and personal mood of whoever it is that decides this. That is the literal meaning of a closed platform. Quality is no deciding factor to get on GoG

Some examples? I'm unaware of GoG disallowing any particular genres on their service. I mean, I'm guessing they probably don't have any eroge. But other than that...

2 - Do people really think MS cares about the gaming market more than the corporate office market as far as OS functionality is concerned? From a corporate perspective something like UWP makes a lot more sense - as just about anyone who's ever fought with conflicting versions of legacy software to address someone's refusal or inability to upgrade from some antique piece of technology will attest.

Seriously, by the time 2020 rolls around I don't think I should have to deal with command line interface applications in an office setting (as a clerk!) anymore.

1) Yes, do it. If it turns out to actually have functionality-destroying problems down the road, you're going to want to switch to Linux or something at that point anyway. Having an old OS is only a good idea if the machine running it is never connected to the internet. The good reason for the forced patching scheme MS is going with these days is the very real security risk posed by legacy systems online.

2) We'll see. If they don't care about our money, Valve has given us a place to flee to. I suspect knowing what the problem is and having that option will give them pause. These bad things might never happen, because they don't want to waste the effort on it if they know they'll have to walk it back.

I'm 100% with you as far as getting ancient machines off the network and out of the office goes. There's good reasons for some of MS's decisions here. But UWP contains lots of changes to things that only gamers and devs are likely to care about. MS might be more focused on the corporate space, but they know we're an important part of their market, and some of what they're doing is clearly calculated to take control of our experience. The only hope of stopping them is to have somewhere else to go if it gets too shitty.

PS: Why do my quotes keep not quoting? I'm getting real tired of having to edit these in. -_-;

Bumpy wrote on Jul 26, 2016, 12:03:I see it as MS trying to be more like Apple. Don't see anyone screaming about them and their closed systems or requirements. People flock to their products.

The shift towards subscriptions is what bothers me. I don't like renting things, I want to own them but this seems to be more and more a thing of the past.

That's because Apple was always like that. The people who use Apple products don't care about that kind of thing. That's why it took years for Mac gaming to really be a thing after it mostly died in the 90s. It's also why PC users always make fun of Mac users. They are mostly people who know nothing about the machines they're using, and don't want to.

Trying to make the PC more like Mac is darkest heresy, and there will be an outcry.

ItBurn wrote on Jul 26, 2016, 10:50:This isn't a conspiracy theory. Microsoft wants a closed platform. They want all the money and the death of their competition.

You mean like Valve? For which having Steam as quasi monopoly wasn't enough so they wanted to take over the whole PC game world with their SteamOS.

That is the most impressively wrong characterization of the state of the market I've ever seen.

Steam isn't a quasi-monopoly. There are a number of strongly competing players. If anything, Valve is very friendly to its competition, as many stores offer games both off Steam and as Steam keys. Steam is certainly the biggest thing in the market, and the most games are released on it by far, but there's other places to go, and some even have exclusive offerings. GOG in particular is doing quite well, since lots of people want things DRM free.

Furthermore, the idea that SteamOS is an attempt to "take over the whole PC game world" is absurd. It is a variety of Linux. You can't "take over" anything with that, for both technical and legal reasons. Besides that, SteamOS has minuscule market share at present. The reason Valve made it is that they know it's very bad for them if one company, especially one that isn't primarily concerned with games, (i.e., Microsoft) has arbitrary control over how PC gaming will work. As such, in the event that MS actually does any of the stupid garbage Sweeney is afraid of, we'll have a shelter to retreat to. The hope is that the threat that we can leave Windows, which we really couldn't before, will keep MS from becoming too brazen.

ItBurn wrote on Jul 26, 2016, 10:50:This isn't a conspiracy theory. Microsoft wants a closed platform. They want all the money and the death of their competition. They're been trying to do this for a long time and now they're actually taking serious steps towards it with Windows 10 and UWP. All of this is bad for the consumer. I'm strongly against all of this too, especially the UWP.

Maybe one day Steam OS(linux) will be the OS for gaming?

This. This a million times. I am fucking dazed reading all these posts calling Sweeney a crackpot. Do any of you have any idea what UWP does?

I like Windows 10, but anyone who pays attention at all knows that MS is trying to do this, and the forced patching is going to cause problems exactly like he describes at some point. Making them reverse their garbage relies on us being aware it's happening, rather than just assuming it's devs' and publishers' fault when shit stops working the way it's supposed to. You know that's what people are gonna do if they're not informed beforehand, Valve is really easy to blame things on considering how much they actually screw up.

Epic is a ridiculous company that employs ridiculous people, but listen to this dude. He knows what he's talking about with UWP. It's not a problem now, but it will be. MS is clearly setting up for a big play.

Malvok wrote on Jul 25, 2016, 20:42:All I want is more Quake, none of this MOBA bullshit. It's just trying to follow on the success of Overwatch. This game has fail written all over it, and that's coming from a die hard quake fan.

Of course, what can we expect from a company that releases Doom without deathmatch or private matches?

"Old Man Yells at Cloud"

It's not a MOBA, and neither is Overwatch. Is this a fad? Yes. Does that make it bad? No. Most people don't play old-school arena shooters anymore because as fun as they were, they're played out. There needs to be something more to it. You can't argue that point, because alot was added to them over the years, by their most dedicated fans, so clearly people thought they needed a little spice. Just about everything AAAs have tried in the past ten years was something a modder did first five years before that. Hell, Unreal Tournament was the poster child for this kind of thing. Every new version of the game featured some quirky new game mode as one of its most important selling points, and every one of those was something some guy hacked together themselves in the previous version.

Trendy stuff didn't kill your bunnyhopping rail parade. That died on its own because most people find it boring after a while without at least laying something on top of it to add some depth. Build a bridge and get over it.

Tachikoma wrote on Jul 3, 2016, 14:49:Well, like I said, RLs require a change of mindset and a new approach, otherwise you`ll think something along the lines of that wildly inaccurate statements above.

There was nothing inaccurate about it. Your statement is equivalent to saying that in order to appreciate traditional roguelikes, most people need to retrain themselves to find different things interesting. If you're capable of doing that, you should take up needlepoint or some other craft instead. Then you have the bonus of being able to sell some junk on etsy.

Tachikoma wrote on Jul 3, 2016, 12:43:Why not be a bit adventurous and try the real thing, aka a proper roguelike. If you get the bug, you`ll never look back.

I did. The vast majority of roguelikes are unbearably tedious. The depth is a really good tease, but it's only ever that unless you're willing to sink several weeks' worth of playtime into doing nothing remotely interesting. That genre is always more fun on the dumb end, like DoomRL or Castle of the Winds.

If you think of ARPGs as a "smoke & mirrors click-fest," it's your fault for playing classes that make them that way. In the original Diablo, to be fair, it might've been the only way you could get through the thing without grinding your teeth to dust. Rogue was seriously overpowered. But in both Diablo II and Path of Exile, I main Necromancer. Specifically, I main the kind that almost everyone disregards as trash for endgame play; hiding in the middle of a shitload of skeletons.

The challenge with a character like that is completely different from the majority of other classes, where the main differences are how attacks are shaped, whether they move you, and how you manage your resources. If you're minion-based, and really leaning hard on it, the game instead becomes "how do I use this meatshield to avoid clicking as much as possible?" You might do everything very slowly compared to everyone else, but where they have to chug thirty potions and click enough bullshit that they might consider getting a special mouse, you walk through hell like you're on a pleasant jaunt to the corner store until you need to drop some curses on a boss.

If you can learn to make a "click-fest" mostly play itself, you don't get to claim it has no depth. :p